First Parish Fitchburg

Welcome! We are an open and affirming congregation dedicated to recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We strive for justice, equity, and compassion. This blog contains the homilies of our minister as well as responses from church members. All sermons are copyrighted.

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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

There’s enough room for all 111 children and youth and their
religious education teachers to stand side by side at the front of the sanctuary
of All Souls New London, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in New London, Connecticut.
The space is wide enough for everyone to face the congregation from the stage, a
long, low platform framed by a vivid skyscape of the horizon at dawn. The entire
congregation participates in the Religious Education Sunday service. Their minister,
the Rev. Carolyn Patierno, greets the congregation as souls, and later steps off
the stage in the middle of the service to play the flute with a congregational ensemble.
The youth hold an energy break, hoisting
a volleyball net and heaving a rainbow-colored beach ball to the seated congregation,
which enthusiastically bats the ball about until the youth recapture it.

The entire service would have been impossible in All Souls’s
old building, a brick church built on a ledge with almost as many steps as seats
in the pews. Built in 1910, that church is long and narrow with a high pulpit and
no room to expand. In 2006, the growing congregation moved out of their historic
home into a new location: a one-time car dealership on the other side of the church‘s
parking lot. At the same time, All Souls opened space in its old building to the
New London Homeless Hospitality Center, a daytime shelter.

But All Souls didn’t just allow the Hospitality Center to occupy
unused space. The congregation installed showers in their new building so that the
homeless guests could bathe. They decided
to engage people’s bodies and invited people into the heart of their space…

More than 100 guests use the Hospitality Center each day, and
at least a dozen come to the church seeking the center … Members of the congregation
have an understanding of the problems of homelessness and poverty, and have seen
the effect of the recession up close.

The congregation takes pride in being good neighbors, and welcoming
the Hospitality Center guests who choose to attend services though none of the guests
have joined the congregation permanently. They are a transient community, and move to wherever they find permanent shelter.
The Hospitality Center [pays] a stipend to the church for the space …but the amount
has not changed in five years. Says
minister Carolyn Patierno, “What we have gotten back is the feeling we are living
out our values.”

All Souls is proud of
being a beacon, not a bunker church… but the church doesn’t just look outward.…
All Souls adopted new, higher expectations for members. Members have to pledge, participate, and show
up, says Lynn Tavormina, All Souls’ incoming president. You don’t just come when
you want to; you come.

At the end of the service, the entire congregation stands and
joins hands, and Patierno leads a call and response: Who are we? All Souls! We are!
All Souls! The souls at All Souls know who
they are, what they are trying to do, and how they are going to do it: together.

The Rev. Sue Phillips, district executive for the Unitarian Universalist
Association’s Clara Barton and Massachusetts Bay districts says, ”Almost any congregation
can do what New London has done. And if every New England congregation could do
some of what New London has done, we would have [another] Great Awakening in New
England. The potential here is enormous.”

Sermon

The Great Awakening refers to periods of religious
revival in American history, beginning in the 1730s and 1740s. A second wave
occurred in the late 1700s into the mid-1800s and the third wave spanned 1850
to 1910, encompassing the era of Social Gospel. Each of these periods awakened
Americans to deeper spiritual connection, shifting focus from church doctrine
to a lived experience of faith. The fervency of preachers sought to reach
beyond intellect to stir the hearts of parishioners summoning them to a
consciousness of grace. The awakenings arose out of particular socio-historical
contexts; the Third Great Awakening emerged in a nation riven by civil war.

In 2012, amidst another vitriolic
campaign cycle, we close a week that saw the death of a U.S. ambassador, three
other diplomats and several civilians in violent uprisings staged at embassies
across North Africa and the Middle East in response not just to an ignorant,
incendiary, hateful video screed against Islam, but in response to a clash in
values that befuddles most Americans who find it difficult if not impossible to
understand why our way of life is not welcome everywhere. Many of us find it
incomprehensible that a poorly produced cartoon film would ignite lethal
protests; but to millions of Muslims the act of desecrating their prophet is as
much an anathema as a nation where the rhetoric of defilement and limitless cash
anonymously poured into campaigns are protected as free speech. Setting aside
critiques of U.S. foreign policy we label anti-American sentiment, let us
consider on this sunny Sunday morning what calls us and from that lens perhaps
we can better comprehend adherents of a faith—any faith—who treat the sacred as
inviolable.

As we know, the dominant cultural strands of
materialism, consumerism, competition (why must we be the greatest nation on
earth?) don’t lend themselves or us to the dominant religious strands of any
Great Awakening. In another article from the current issue of UU World magazine, the Rev, Ana
Levy-Lyons asks:

Do we UUs … experience a tension between
our religious values and the values of the secular world? It seems clear that there
should be tension, enormous tension. Until the world is as it should be, until war
and hunger are abolished, until we are living gently on the earth, until power is
shared and all voices are heard, we should not be able to fit comfortably into this
culture. We should feel this tension in every decision we make: when we shop, when
(and if) we watch TV, when we go to work, when we speak to a child. The questions
of to what extent and in what ways we should participate in the dominant culture
should keep us up at night. If we’re doing it right, it should be hard to be a Unitarian
Universalist in this world.

Think about that. When we think of Orthodox Jews or
observant Muslims, Sikhs or Seventh Day Adventists we might imagine the
challenges they face maintaining demanding dietary practices or donning distinctive
head coverings. We might marvel at how Muslims fast during Ramadan, abstaining
from water in the scorching August sun or wonder if young Sikh boys resent
their turbans. We might casually admire their discipline or devotion or toss it
off as outdated and relish the freedom of a religious affiliation that seems to
ask nothing more of us than keeping an open mind and the willingness to serve
fair-trade coffee.

But what would it mean to be kept up at night
questioning the extent of acceptable participation in the dominant culture?
What would it mean to devote some portion of our day to genuine mindfulness and
study about a foreign policy that presumes that our way of life is both
superior and desirable to all? What would it mean to inhabit the personas of millions
of people whose faith holds primacy in their hierarchy of values. Not
democracy, not liberty, not the pursuit of happiness. What would it mean to don
the humility to even imagine that point view, without judgment, pity or scorn?

What would it mean to step back from our own lives
and examine our culture from afar? What would we make of the lines of traffic
on highways and in superstore aisles juxtaposed with empty sanctuaries,
shuttered schools, abandoned houses? What would we face were we to peer into
factory feed lots where tens of thousands of sentient beings live lives
reminiscent of concentration camps except that these beings are fattened for
slaughter by the master race? If our days were organized around five times of
prayer, what would our schedule look like? What would change if lunch were
preceded by a brief period of consciousness about where our food comes from?
How it gets to our plate and whether it gets to someone else’s? How would it
change a wedding day to begin it by contemplating the American ritual of buying
a dress, often costly, never to be worn again? To say nothing of spending tens
of thousands on a two-or-three day party? How would evening be transformed by
nightly prayers of moral inventory and self-reflection?

If piety meant religious principles above all else,
if commitment to creating heaven on earth, that is to say a commonwealth of
equity, justice and peace founded on planetary sustainability were paramount,
would it be a conceivable response to a deliberate act of desecration to
express outrage? Could we imagine ourselves traveling en masse to offices of
legislators who pass draconian funding cuts while doling out tax breaks and
subsidies to industries of mass production and destruction? Could we imagine
ringing the White House as Bill McKibben and other environmentalists did to try
to block the Alberta Tar Sands Pipeline from defiling this swath of earth? In
multiple daily prayers would we have time to consider what it means to
categorize only certain people as environmentalists as if any humans could
detach from the ground of being that makes human life possible? Would less TV,
texting or technology-driven convenience leave us more time to prayerfully
ponder why it is that we will spend billions to elect politicians eager to hydrofracture
shale, remove mountaintops, oil the waters and chastise the military for
developing alternative fuels while expecting them to end every speech by
commanding God to bless the United States of America? How can God bless what we
defile?

The Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons remind us in her essay drawn
from a sermon.

Religious communities have almost always started out countercultural.
The early Christian community described in the book of Acts … were so inspired by
the teachings of Jesus that they completely broke from their social context. They
gave away all their possessions and lived together in spiritual community. Being
a Christian was not initially seen as compatible with living a normal life, working
a normal job, or even owning land. These early Christians were asserting an alternative
vision of how people can live together in service of a larger mission.

Centuries before Jesus, ancient Israelites
envisioned a world far more responsive to those burdened by inequity: the poor,
the oppressed, the widowed and orphaned, the refugee. Consider how profoundly
countercultural it would be in 2012 to reinstate the year of Jubilee. From the
book of Leviticus (25:10) “You are to consecrate the fiftieth year, proclaiming
freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee for
you; you will return everyone to the land he owns and everyone is to return to
his family.”

Just to
conceptualize what such a year would mean boggles the mind. Would we start by returning
land to Native Americans? Would we make reparations to the descendents of
millions of enslaved Africans who toiled and died here? Would we follow by
releasing the fifty-five billion animals we call livestock now penned in feed
lots? Would we return foreclosed homeowners to the houses? Would we liberate
all the bonded laborers employed in this country? Would we seriously consider
forgiveness of debt for everyone who has borrowed heavily to pay for health
care, food, college, transportation for work if there is work to be found?

Contrast this concept of a jubilee
year proscribed in the Hebrew Scriptures as a way to achieve justice with a
Forbes Real-Time Billionaire feature that tracks the daily gains and losses for
major public holdings of a select group of billionaires. Not their net worth,
just public holdings. For instance, Sheldon Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands,
made $590 million on a single stock holding. Forbes updates this information
every fifteen minutes from 9:30-4:00, the business hours of the New York Stock
Exchange.

Is this worth countering?

And do we have the will to do so?

The Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons observes,

… countercultural vision has reappeared repeatedly in different
forms throughout history. The Occupy movement, especially in its actual occupying
phase, was a recent [example] of it. Sadly, the trajectory of these movements is
almost always one of decline: the commitment fades, the momentum fizzles, the teachings
ossify. Over time, people find it too hard to stand so alienated from the lives
they once knew. The sacrifices are too great.

She quotes James Luther Adams, one
of the leading Unitarian Universalist theologians of the twentieth century who
wrote:

The element of commitment, of change of hearts,
of decision so much emphasized in the Gospels, has been neglected by religious liberalism,
and that is the prime source of its enfeeblement. We liberals are largely an uncommitted
and therefore self-frustrating people. Our first task, then, is to restore to liberalism
its own dynamic and its own prophetic genius . . . A holy community must be a militant
community with its own explicit faith; and this explicit faith cannot be engendered
without disciplines that shape the ethos of the group and that issue in the criticism
of the society and of the religious community itself.

Discipline, sacrifice, explicit faith. What could be
more countercultural in a culture defined by life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness? Many of the world’s people subscribe to a vision shaped by
discipline, sacrifice and explicit faith. We who espouse life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness too often embody our life, our liberty, our pursuit of
happiness and the rest be damned while God blesses America.

This morning I invite you to consider what it would
mean for this congregation to become religiously countercultural. I invite you
to discuss it at social hour. How would such a choice impact what we eat? What
we serve? How we worship and where? How would such a choice guide the
allocation of resources? The ministries we undertake? The policies we enact?

In New London, a congregation made the bold choice,
first to work together to become a congregation of commitment, so as to enable
itself to live out the teaching of the Social Gospel, to take seriously the
biblical mandates to serve the least among us: those we make least through our
silence, our complicity, our inertia.

Last April, I preached a sermon expressing my desire
to live with more coherent intention. To live counterculturally in community.
This issue of the UU World gives me
hope that our denomination won’t collapse into irrelevance—relegating ourselves
to rhetoric of goodness without the sacrifice, discipline and explicit faith
James Luther Adams called for last century.

I began this new church year last week by asking,
“What can we do together to re-connect more deeply with the ground of being to
which we all belong?” I see it as another way to frame what it means to become
that holy community Adams speaks of, the community envisioned in Leviticus and
Acts, and in the Holy Qu’ran. I hear it as call from our sister congregation in
New London to spark another Great Awakening and I am listening for our reply.
Amen.

Our closing words come from the current issue of the UU World by way of Om Prakash:

Do not sit alone in the dark while creation sings a three
part harmony.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Recently I listened to an interview on my favorite
public radio show, On Being. Krista Tippett interviewed Christian Wiman, a
poet, essayist, and editor of Poetry
Magazine. Wiman grew up in West Texas in a Southern Baptist family. Like
many young people, he left the church and religion when he left home, but
several years later he returned to religion, to God. I was so engaged by the
program, I listened to the unedited ninety-minute interview, then watched his
interview with Bill Moyers. What captivated me most was this exchange with
Krista Tippett who asks:

[If] you think about yourself in church all those
years ago in west Texas, the church you grew up in, which was just given to you
like the air you breathed and then when you're in church now, what's going on
that's different? How is that experience different?

Mr Wiman: Well,
it's utterly different. I think it's a weaker experience now. I mean, I'm just
too conscious. I wish I were able to let myself go in ways that those people
did in my childhood and still do. When I go to my mother's church now, it's one
of those big mega-churches. You know, I don't agree with their theology and I
don't like a lot of the ways that they commercialize their services, but it is
an incredibly diverse church and the people are intensely
involved. They're treating it as if their whole life were at
stake. The churches I go to, liberal Protestant churches, it seems pretty
casual. I wish there were some credible middle ground. I wish there was some
way of harnessing that — the intensity that I felt in my childhood in more
sophisticated ways.

You know how I talk about my inner-tent-revivalist?
Well this is the tent I’ve been talking about and it’s going up now. Somebody
left that barn door open and my inner-revivalist is coming out. Seriously,
there is a deep and vast hunger to marry the intensity of a tent revival with a
sophisticated understanding of spirit, and we, brothers and sisters, can
officiate. But first we must recognize the power of treating church as if our
whole life were at stake.

Now it’s easy to dismiss this part; we don’t labor
under the threat of eternal damnation. But we live in a state of perpetual
disconnection that causes this hunger. Our daily lives are filled with a
thousand choices that either connect or disconnect us from the ground of our
being—choices that don’t even feel like choices anymore. None of us wants to
purchase products made by exploited workers but we figure what’s our choice? So
we buy the smart phone or the cheap underwear, or anything else we can find at
the big-box store, the discount chain or online, and it tears a little each
time we do because even if we rationalize with our minds, the heart center,
that core part of our being where knowing, not just thinking, resides, sighs.
We know even if we ignore it that there’s no clean way to extract oil or
natural gas. Fossil fuels are dirty even if the ads for them are sanitized.
Literally everywhere we turn, we feel trapped by what feels like an inevitable,
inescapable path paved with the bricks of individualism, competition, and fear.
Our political discourse bounces between ridiculous and rancorous; we let the
free market—not our core values—decide and then shrug our shoulders with a
combination of resignation and powerlessness. We don’t know what to tell or
teach our children about yet another fatal shooting in school; and we don’t
know what to say to those same children for whom bullying is a fact of life and
video war games are staple entertainment.

Daily we spiral deeper into disconnect and the
evidence is ubiquitous. Addiction, asthma, autism, depression, PTSD, chronic
fatigue, poverty, income disparity—all on the rise. We all experience the
disconnect whether or not we name it, see it, or believe it. Our bodies, the
heart-center in each of us knows it. Our lives are at stake.

And yet we see an Easter headline like this one from
the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise:
“Worshippers Waning: Local ministers say fewer of the faithful attend Easter
Services.” And why are people not coming to church the way they did in the
past? Because the old paradigm isn’t working.

Last month I read Thomas Bandy’s
book, Kicking Habits: Welcome Relief for
Addicted Churches. According to Bandy, twentieth-century folks went to
church to belong to an institution, to secure status among the right social
set, because neighbors and coworkers asked, “What church do you attend?” People
joined to belong, and then the church set about to inform them of its
structure, both implicit and explicit. Folks got nominated to committees and
boards. They were groomed to maintain the church as an institution and train
the next generation. Though they began as members, writes Bandy, they ended up
as guardians: keepers of the institution. But in this millennium, he contends,
people come to church, if they come at all, seeking something else. Not
institutional belonging, not doctrine, not hierarchy, not committee meetings.
People today seek deeper meaning, a greater sense of relevance and purpose.
Bandy is not the only one reporting this. Every commentator or researcher I
read says the same thing. People hunger to reconnect with the ground of being.
For some that is God, for others, it is just that, the ground of all being,
including theirs.

Bandy distinguishes between declining churches and
thriving churches. Congregations, he asserts, must cross-examine themselves.
Ask not what is important to many but truly essential to all?

In the newspaper article the minister of our sister
congregation in Leominster says, “she tries to make religion and church life
relevant for people in the post-modern age.” But even where there’s a parking
lot, attendance is down on Easter. Why? Because it’s not enough to pepper our
sermons with contemporary cultural references or sing folk songs. We have to
act as if our lives are at stake. We have to address the deep disquieting
discomforting disconnect that truncates our lives, that induces amnesia so that
we forget and worse, deny our inter-being, the interdependency of the web.
People come here seeking concrete ways to re-connect, to mend the torn fabric
of creation, to engage in tikkun olam,
not simply to do for others, but to relearn compassion for ourselves because we
can’t give away what we don’t have.

People come to church not just to find relevance but
to be relevant, which is to say related. Religion—from the Latin word
for refasten. So how do we refasten
ourselves? How do we re-member, re-attach that cleaved part that longs to be
made whole?

We begin by re-connecting as Unitarian Universalists
to a distinct tradition fraught with dissent that arose out of an insistence
that we unite the intensity of religious fervor with our capacity for critical
and compassionate thought. We recall the early martyrs of our movement who
dared to speak against the religious hierarchies and edicts of their day, where
their lives were literally at stake—being burned there. We teach our children
and they more likely teach us what it means to take a stand—to stand with those
who would otherwise go unprotected, unrepresented, whose dignity even the state
would flagrantly defile.

In the nineteenth century, many Unitarian
congregations split over slavery. Wealthy New England industrialists and mill
owners defended it. Nothing is more profitable than slave labor. No doubt some
of our churches have endowments built on those welted backs. The abolitionists
who spoke up often got run out but they did not go silently because long before
a gentle Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh taught two generations
of westerners the term “inter-are,” abolitionists knew about the
interconnectedness of being. And that knowing propelled them to speak against
the willful ignorance of those who cherry-picked the Bible in defense of an
economy based on defilement.

A century later, when Jim Crow still wielded the
lash, a Unitarian minister in Boston named James Reeb heeded Martin Luther
King’s call to join marchers in Selma. Jim Reeb died at thirty-eight leaving
behind his wife and four children when white men gusseted by fear beat him for
the courage of his convictions, probably because to them, pardon the phrase, he
looked like a nigger-lover. He died by the hand of segregationists and for that
he is remembered in Unitarian Universalist circles, but it was not his death
that embodied his sense of connection; it was his years of ministry working to
integrate neighborhoods and churches, and most importantly, the human heart.
Jim Reeb did not duck controversy or dodge danger by eschewing the divisive. He
understood the fearfulness that grips us and how quickly it transmogrifies into
rage.

A decade ago, before any states had passed marriage
equality laws, the church where I had interned, a church that had welcomed and
affirmed me, that loved the music director and his male partner of near twenty
years, fractured around the full impact of what it meant to be a welcoming
congregation. The suggestion to fly a large rainbow flag met with resistance.
What if people in town think we only welcome gays and not other minorities?
What if people reduce us to being “the gay church”? And with equal urgency
others in the congregation countered, but we are the only church that welcomes gay and transgender people.
Religious institutions have rejected, vilified queer folk for centuries.
Consider what it means for people to be welcomed not shunned? We have the power
to do that, they pled.

A while back, during social hour, I overheard Dick
mention people picketing in front of Planned Parenthood so I made an
appointment a couple of weeks ago to meet the outreach coordinator there. The
director of the clinic let me in. I had to ring a buzzer so the director could
check the live video feed to make sure she didn’t let in someone with a weapon.
If I might speak to the women for just a moment, do you remember your first
pelvic exam? I was terrified. The thought of it was creepy and invasive. I
cannot imagine overlaying that late adolescent self-consciousness and fear with
having to be buzzed into a building because someone might burst in and shoot
the doctor. It doesn’t matter that no abortions are performed in Fitchburg. To
the people who carry signs equating abortion with murder, they are content to
willfully ignore the statistics: that nationally, 97% of the health services
Planned Parenthood provides are not related to an abortion—or that abortion is
still legal. It is not that the protesters are evil or even hateful though it
probably feels that way to the young woman terrified because she has missed a
period, or the young man afraid he has contracted or spread an STD, who have finally
summoned the courage to get tested—as they walk through the gauntlet of stares,
signs and disparaging remarks.

As I said before, we live in a world that
perpetually disconnects us. Each day every one of us without wanting to, or
meaning to, or even thinking that we are, engage in processes that diminish
life. The World Health Organization estimates that somewhere between 30-40,000
children die every day of preventable conditions, namely the lack of clean
water and adequate nutrition. Right this minute there are thousands of children
languishing in foster homes. And thousands more abducted, sold into sexual
slavery, splayed on pornographic websites. You don’t need me to list all the
ways we defile the inherent worth and dignity of so many beings. It’s easier to
fixate on abortion as the single most egregious form of defilement than to
reckon with all the forms in which we are complicit.

And yes, I could tell you the story of my great
aunt, or really my father telling me about her, the way she came to him late in
her life, when he became president of the local Planned Parenthood, and
revealed to him what it had been like in the 1920s for her to climb the stairs
of the tenement abortionist when she could not face bringing a third child into
an apartment ravaged by an abusive alcoholic. It was not something she could
discuss with her rabbi or seek solace for from her congregation.

But if one’s religious community is not a safe place
to seek counsel or support or even companionship what does that say about the
nature of religious community—a community intended to bind us together?

At the annual meeting I am asking that the
congregation consider displaying a banner of support that reads: Love
Responsibly. Support Planned Parenthood.

Why opt for something so divisive you might ask? Or
seemingly political? For the same reason abolitionists objected to slavery when
the biggest church donors profited from it. For the same reason Jim Reeb went
down to Selma. For the same reason churches fly rainbow flags or banners
supporting marriage equality.

To be relevant to the people of this congregation
and community, that is to say related. To claim our connection with the
heretical roots of our denomination, the branch that declared errors in the
Trinity, and the branch that declared universal salvation, when both assertions
sometimes resulted in death. Our denomination has been forged out of the
courage to not only withstand the fires of condemnation and misunderstandding,
but to champion conscience, reason, compassion and direct experience when no
one else will.

We have the opportunity, as the church where I
interned had years before, to publicly declare our support for people
historically shunned by religious institutions: to affirm the inherent worth
and dignity of the people a few blocks from here who seek medical services or
work in a health clinic with surveillance cameras because our society hasn’t
found a way to counter the deadliness of fear and ignorance yet.

And yes, if we hang a banner some people will say, “that’s
the abortion church.”But you know that
just gives us the chance to say, “It’s not as simple as that.” Why not help
shape a more thoughtful, compassionate and sophisticated dialogue? Why not
re-connect with our own heretical roots? The etymological root of heresy, by
the way, is choice.

Amid the overwhelming forces of disconnection, we
hunger to reconnect. To restore wholeness cleaved a thousand times a day.
Sisters and brothers, our lives are
at stake. May we make of them a tent. Amen.

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First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Fitchburg is located at 923 Main St. in Fitchburg, MA. Services are held Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m. Religious Education and childcare available. www.fitchburguu.org